Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 510: Playoff Pitching and the Pace of Play

Episode Date: August 8, 2014

Ben, Russell Carleton, and Michael Baumann discuss whether winning in the playoffs is any different from winning in August, then talk about ways to shorten games.

Good morning and welcome to episode 510 of Effectively Wild, the daily podcast from Baseball Perspectus presented by the BaseballReference.com Play Index. I am Ben Lindberg, a writer for Grantland.com. Sam, my usual partner, you know him as Sam, Sam Miller, is at the Area Code games today, and his hotel internet was not up to the task of podcasting. So, therefore, I have replaced him with two other people because it takes two people to fill his shoes. One you know well, Russell Carlton from

Baseball Prospectus. Hello, Russell. Hi, I get the left shoe. And the other podcast partner today is Michael Bauman, who is one of my colleagues at Grantland and also a writer for Crash Burn Alley and a regular listener whom we have mentioned on the show many times. Hello, Michael. Hi, Ben. First time, long time. So I apologize to everyone if the audio quality is not up to our usual standards. We should be back to normal on Monday.

But for now, we are going to toss around a couple topics. First of all, was anyone impressed by Javier Baez? Who's that? I haven't heard anything about him. What's he do? We did a podcast about him this past week. I thought you listened to the show.

Once in a while, yeah, I do. Yeah, the Cubs are starting of starting to look scary now, so that's kind of cool. Yeah, so he hit three home runs in his first series at Coors Field, of course. It's a joke stadium. Anybody could hit three home runs at Coors Field. Exactly. So it's probably wise to mention that caveat at the same time.

Not everyone in that series hit three home runs. He hit two of them to the opposite field. One of them was particularly impressive looking. Sam wrote an article this week about scouting Javier Baez as a non-scout. And I think his main takeaway was that he swings hard. And that doesn't look so great when he misses but it looks pretty good when he makes contact so that was fun to watch and I look forward to watching it more and I think my favorite thing about the Javier Baez story now might be the

the Manny Ramirez narrative that Manny Ramirez is now getting credit for helping turn Baez's season around. Manny Ramirez is now Mr. Miyagi, which is weird. I like any story that involves Manny Ramirez. I think I'm going to solicit him for writing advice. Me too, and this is a different sort of story. You always heard that he was a hitting savant, but not necessarily that he would be the best candidate to pass on those skills to others. coaching Baez and coaching other top prospects, that was something that people questioned when he was hired. You really want to entrust all of these future superstars to Manny Ramirez, but it seems that he bonded with Baez and with others. And so I'm enjoying that aspect of the story as

well. So two things we want to talk about today. One is something that I wrote for Grantland on Thursday with a big assist from Russell. And it's about rotations and the playoffs and the A's and the Tigers. And we are also going to talk a bit about some pace of game stuff, something CJ Nikkowski wrote for Fox the other day. So we can start with the rotation stuff. So the main point of the piece was that there's this new rivalry of super rotations between the A's and the Tigers. Of course, these are two teams that have met in the ALDS the last couple of years and have gone five games.

And both of those series have hinged on a Justin Verlander dominant game five start. Both of those series have hinged on a Justin Verlander dominant game five start. And both of these teams upgraded at the deadline and they added a fourth really strong starter to what was already a pretty good rotation in each team's case. And so the question I was trying to explore was whether there is anything to the idea that pitching wins in the playoffs, that pitching wins pennants. And I asked Russell to help me figure this out because this was a lot of people's take on these trades was that Bean and Dombrowski realized that pitching wins pennants and that they needed to go get pitching and that this will be the best way that they can ensure success in the playoffs. So I asked Russell to do some gory math, and you did, Russell.

Yeah, I took a look at over the, I went back through the series that have been played in the playoffs since 1969, which is when the divisional play in the league championship series began. And I went and I pulled all of the series that have happened. I looked at what each team's first three starters in those games were. So you kind of get an idea for who was one, two, and three. That could be a little off because sometimes a team, sometimes a team has to, you know, burn their ace in game 162 to just get in. But that's, you know,

that's kind of what they're dealing with in the playoffs. And I checked to see, okay, does anything about these pitchers, does it predict whether or not a team's going to win the game or not, or the series or not? And the answer actually turned out to be no. You know, I threw a whole bunch of stuff at him, like, oh, you know, teams with high strikeout pitchers, no. Walks, no.

Home runs, no. All kinds of fun things to throw in some more exotic stuff. And it turns out that the, you know, who you had as your pitching staff didn't move the needle on whether or not you had a good chance to win the series or not. Actually, the best predictor was just I had a control variable for the team's regular season records and how we would then project that to a five or seven game series. And that actually did a really good job. So it's just kind of overall team quality rather than pitchers.

So that's interesting. So a lot of people, you know, it's maybe not the most intuitive finding. It seems like in the playoffs, pitching should be something that gives you maybe a bigger advantage proportionally just because you can you can kind of manipulate how pitchers pitch in the playoffs more so than you can with with your your hitters your defenders you can concentrate innings among your best pitchers you can work the the starters that you like really hard. You can work the relievers that you like really hard.

You don't have to start your shaky fifth starter or your mop-up man or your middle reliever so much. So it seems like there should be a benefit to that. And I tried to explain why that doesn't seem to be the case or doesn't seem to be the case as much as we would expect. Would you like to summarize your own understanding of why we don't see an even bigger advantage for teams that have a strong ace or strong top of the rotation relative to,

or, you know, once we adjust for their regular season record? Yeah, I mean, you think about it, and it's kind of a, it's a hard finding to really explain in two or three sentences, but I'll do my best here. The, you know, having a good strong, you know, trading for John Lester, trading for David Price makes you a better team. There's a question about that, but what it does is it makes you a better team rather than, you know, confer some magic power on you through this magical amulet of pitching winning out in the playoffs. But, you know, my best explanation for it is this,

is that the playoff teams as a group are a very self-selected group of people, of teams that come in to make the playoffs. If your team does not have that strong ace, well, they won 90 games somehow. So maybe they had, you know, an elite bullpen. Maybe they had some fantastic guys in the lineup. I know that behind the scenes we kind of talked about the 95 World Series matchup where the Braves had Maddox, Glavin, Smoltz, and the Indians had, you know,

the smoldering remains of Dennis Martinez and Oral Hershiser and Charles Nagy. But the Indians had Manny Ramirez in seventh. And so, I mean, there's, you know, Charles Nagy, but the Indians had Manny Ramirez in seventh. And so, I mean, there's a team that makes the playoffs, while they may not have that ace or that really strong top three or whatever, they have to be doing something right, and that's what allowed them to win the 90 games. And, you know, the idea that this, that trope about, you know,

good hitting always beats, or good pitching always beats good hitting just isn't true. We run the numbers, and we find that good hitting versus good pitching kind of yields middle-of-the-road outcomes. So, you know, it's just October baseball is a lot like August baseball. You're right, you can kind of concentrate your innings on the good guys, but you're also dealing with a group of teams that probably have some superpower about them, and that's why they're in the playoffs. Right. Plus, if you concentrate your innings too much, that could backfire in a sense that there has been some research that's looked at pitchers going on short rest in the postseason and how they don't pitch quite as well as they wouldn't normally. the end of the long season, if you suddenly start asking all your guys to start pitching on short rests, that could potentially backfire. They might just pitch worse, and then you'll be no better off

than the team that is starting everyone on regular rest but has inferior starters. So it's easy to recall the examples of times when, you know diamondbacks when randy johnson and kurt schilling seemed to pitch every day uh they they started 11 of the 17 diamondbacks games in those playoffs which was nice for the diamondbacks because their other alternatives were brian anderson and albie lopez but albie lopez but it's rare to have a Randy Johnson or a Curt Schilling who can physically do that, especially today, even more so than 2001. So you figure there is some benefit. I mean, there's still a significant chance that the A's could end up in the wildcard game, perhaps.

It's more likely that the Angels will, but it's possible that the A's will. card game, perhaps. It's more likely that the Angels will, but it's possible that the A's will. And so there's maybe a benefit in that one single game. They've now increased their chances of not having to start Jason Hamill in that game or Jesse Chavez in that game. It's not that those are options that many teams would be happy to have those back of rotations. But the A's have done better than that. And I guess the other thing is that, yeah, as you said, you're playing other strong teams. And maybe the best example of that is that the A's and the Tigers might very well play each other. Probably not in the ALDS, but possibly in the ALCS. other in probably not in the ALDS, but possibly in the ALCS. And then there's no, there's no edge really to having a super rotation because you are facing a team whose rotation is, is comparable.

And so when you look at the stats, it will, it will look like, you know, whichever, whichever team won that series, another, another team with an equally strong rotation will have lost that series. And so it will look like there was no advantage to having that great four-man rotation because the other team did too. And I guess even though having the fourth man is good, it means that you can start everyone on regular rest. And because all of their four starters are very good you don't have to compromise you get the benefits of a deep rotation and the benefits of a top heavy rotation they have it all and they get to move someone to the bullpen whether it's Chavez or Hamill or Verlander in the Tigers case and that helps too there's some sort of ripple effect then again how

many starts does a fourth starter make for most teams in the playoffs not not a whole lot plus the better your top three are the more likely it is that you don't necessarily need that fourth guy to be great i gave the example of uh the braves 1997 nlds when they had maddox, Glavin, Smoltz at the top, and then they had Denny Nagel as their fourth starter, who was great that year. He was really good that year, but he didn't even have to pitch in that series

because Maddox, Glavin, and Smoltz won the first three games, and then Nagel was just sitting there, and I guess waiting for the NLCS. So for all those reasons, if the pitching wins penance thing is a thing, if it exists, it's probably a marginal thing. It's great that they have strong rotations. They are certainly two of the best teams that have the best chances to win. But if they had made some other move at the deadline and upgraded at some other position by the same amount, if a big bat had been out there somewhere and them play each other in the postseason because that would be a very exciting series i think yeah it makes

me wonder if we've just sort of started to overthink the difference between playoff baseball and regular season baseball because the strategy of the pitcher use changes, but like the rules don't change and the pitcher use strategy has really a kind of a small effect because, you know, what's the difference over three starts that a fourth starter would make between Sonny Gray and Jason Hamill? I mean, that Sonny Gray is going to be particularly better than Hamill in these three particular starts.

So I was sort of surprised that there wasn't an effect, but I'm finding myself, as I look back on it, more and more surprised that I was surprised that playoff baseball isn't significantly different than regular season baseball like this. Yeah, that's one of the things I wrote, because we're always perplexed that we can't come up with an answer to this question of what makes teams win in the playoffs. And maybe we can't come up with an answer because it's just not that good a question.

Maybe we shouldn't expect there to be some secret sauce to refer to the attempt that Nate Silver made to find a factor that led to postseason success that baseball prospectus ended up discarding because it didn't prove predictive outside of the sample that he used to find out whether there were such factors. So I don't know. The game changes, certainly. Aesthetically, there is less scoring in the postseason for a few reasons. The weather is colder. And, of course, the composition of the pitching staffs change. And I wrote about that in the article, that the guys who actually end up pitching in the playoffs, if you look at their regular season stats, it's about half a run lower than the team's regular season pitching stats as a whole. But that's the case for every team. And maybe

it's slightly more so for some teams and slightly less so for other teams. But just because there is less scoring doesn't necessarily mean that scoring is not important. You still just need to outscore the other team, whether that is because you scored a lot of runs or because you didn't let the other team score any runs. Both strategies work. So it doesn't seem like there's a total paradigm shift in how one wins in October relative to how one wins in April.

But we keep coming up with all these theories because, I guess, because it's so important and everything is magnified and it's not like the regular season where you have 162 games. It's five games or seven games or four games. And so we kind of grasp at these straws of things that, you know, maybe might help you win because the, the,

the unpredictability of it is unsettling. You know, it's, we want to feel like we have some, some kind of control, I guess, over the outcome. And so,

Russell, you've, you've written about all sorts of playoff myths that playoff experience matters and momentum matters. Exactly, doesn't, right. Right, and how you finish the regular season, whether you back into the playoffs or you're on a hot streak when the playoffs start.

Jay Jaffe has looked at that. And I've looked at the theory that small ball wins in October and that, that teams that score a greater percentage of their runs via the homer are less suited to scoring in October, which turns out to be the opposite of the case. The teams that score a greater percentage of their runs on home runs tend to keep more of their run production in the playoffs than, than other teams.

So all of these theories that we have don't seem to work all that well, and maybe we should just let go and accept that we can't predict it and that teams that are better teams have a better chance, as we would expect, in the regular season also, and that might not show up over a short series. And so that might be disappointing if you were a fan of that team and that team loses. But in the long run,

that seems to be just about the only thing that matters, how good you are, and not necessarily why you are that good. Well, what you said a couple minutes ago about wanting to feel like we have some control, I think that's why we keep looking. Because it's just, for playoff baseball, a couple minutes ago about wanting to feel like we have some control. I think that's why we keep looking because it's just for playoff baseball, it's just because it's so important and we have so much time to pick over the minutia. It's, it's not fun to be nihilistic about it.

Yeah. It's like, you know, nothing matters, but luck. But, you know, I remember if you want to talk about good teams and great playoff rotations, I remember vividly the 2011 Phillies losing because Cliff Lee gave up 12 bloop singles in game two. And there were a couple close base running plays in game four, including one involving a squirrel. And that's how that rotation loses to, you know, the Cardinals team that was almost as good.

But it's just not, I guess it's not, it's more comforting to try to look for causes than it is to just sort of embrace the randomness of suffering. Right. Okay. the randomness of suffering. Right. Okay, so let's pivot to our other topic, which is pace of game. Buster Olney wrote today about what he believes are the biggest issues facing the next commissioner,

who seems like will be named next week. And the number one thing on his list was the pace of the game and shortening the time of game and speeding up the game. And he seems to feel that a pitch clock is inevitable. We wanted to also talk about an article by CJ Nikowski for Fox this week, where he talks about limiting mound visits. And so this is one of the things that the Atlantic League is now experimenting with. Sam and I referred to that briefly in a recent show that the Atlantic League has put all of these measures into place to shorten games.

And it's seemed as sort of an experiment that if these things work, maybe Major League Baseball will consider adopting some of them so so one of them and the one that that cj specifically mentioned was uh that coaches in the atlantic league are only allowed to visit the mound three times in the course of one game when they are not making a pitching change and that the visits are only allowed to last 45 seconds and if they violate that rule then there is a ball charge to the batter so the the first thing the the mound visits thing uh i don't i i'm kind of i'm wondering how much time that that would save because i mean limiting it to three times i think that would that would cover the vast majority of games, right? Because when I

wrote recently about Yadier Molina, one of the things that I was looking at with Molina was, I was interested in whether the rate of mound visits declines when Molina is catching relative to some other catcher catching the same pitcher, because part of Molina's reputation is that he's like another coach out there. He can pick up all these things about a pitcher that a coach would. And so theoretically, a coach wouldn't have to make as many mound visits. And it turns out that that's the case, that excluding pitching changes, there are only half as many mound visits when Molina is catching relative to some other catcher catching the same pitcher. But even with a non-Molina catcher, it's like two mound visits per 100 pitches was about the average.

And there are more than 100 pitches in a game. So I don't know, maybe the average per game is 2.5 or something. So I guess if you're limiting it to three, you'll, you'll cut down somewhat, although most games would, would fall within three, but the 45 seconds thing, um, I, I don't, I don't know what the average time of a mound visit is, but it seems like at least with some of the slower coaches, uh, just getting to the mound is close to 45 seconds. So that would help, I suppose. But Michael, you have some feelings about pace. What are your feelings about pace?

Well, I mean, the mound visit thing, it just seems so, I don't think it could hurt, but I don't like limiting the number per game, although I guess they're already limited in that you can only visit the mound once an inning and then you have to take a pitcher out. But this just seems like trying to lose weight by cutting out your fourth Big Mac of the day. This is something that might save a few seconds on the aggregate.

I think that if we're serious about getting the length of game back down closer to two hours, it would have to be either curtailing or limiting mound visits or just taking – just outlawing them all together. If you visit the mound, you're a coach in the middle of the game, then you have to take a pitcher out. I think that would be interesting. Bill James, like 15 years ago, I mean, he wrote about everything in the new historical baseball abstract,

but one of his things was limiting throws to first. And again, I think that would save some time, but I don't know that it would make baseball seem snappy the way everybody seems to remember it being. Yeah, I mean, you'd think that if mound visits were outlawed, that wouldn't be a really disruptive change to the game, right? I mean, mound visits, you'd think, other than injury visits, if we're just talking about strategic visits or settle down at their visits, I mean, it seems like almost like a little league thing, kind of. By the time you get to the big leagues, you should be able to, you know, settle yourself down and not and be able to

center yourself and take a moment and think I've been in this situation 100 times before, I should be calm and not not throw wildly because I'm trying to get this out, that sort of thing. and not throw wildly because I'm trying to get this out, that sort of thing. And strategically, too, like, you know, a Major League Baseball player, you'd think could study scouting reports and remember, okay, so this is how I pitch this guy and wouldn't necessarily need to be reminded by that. And plus, you know, you can talk in between innings, right? So if you need to, if you need to say, okay, these are the three guys who are coming up, let's, let's go over our approach against these guys again. That seems like something you could do too, right? I mean,

it's not like, uh, pitchers would just be completely lost if they couldn't get a mid-inning reminder from a coach. And, And maybe if that's the case, you know, we don't necessarily know what the effect of a mound visit is. Russell, I know you are planning to do an article on that, and I look forward to it. But we don't know, you know, whether pitchers actually pitch better than you would expect them to right after a mound visit or not but but maybe maybe if mound visits are outlawed maybe that you know maybe the mental aspect of pitching becomes slightly more important maybe your maybe your ability to control your emotions on the mound and and your makeup and your preparation and that sort of thing, maybe that becomes a more prized skill and a more valuable skill.

And that seems like that would maybe make things more interesting, that you'd have a slightly bigger advantage to players who are willing to put the time in to study opposing hitters' tendencies or have better control of their emotions during the game. That would be maybe something that would be slightly more, more valued in a post mound visit world, but it doesn't seem like, uh, we would suffer in any way from not having mound visits. It doesn't seem like a pitcher who, who was prepared would suffer significantly from not having any mound visits. You know, you can, you signals from the dugout if you need to discuss whatever it

is, alignments and, you know, where fielders are standing. So it seems like we could do away with that if we wanted to be serious about speeding up games. I don't know whether that's the best way. Maybe, you know, maybe you can make more of an impact with limiting time between pitches just because there are a lot of pitches and a lot of time between them.

Yeah. I mean, eliminating mound visits, and I actually did, this was about four years ago, I actually did some stuff on length of game. I think I looked at it from kind of mid-inning pitching changes, which people whine about too. And I calculated something along the lines of if you got rid of all of them,

it would save you about three or four minutes on the course of a game. And, I mean, there's some amount, I mean, kind of the connective tissue around all of these pace of game issues is that there is no penalty for dawdling. You know, there is. And so the incentives are all toward, you know, let's take that extra couple of seconds. You know, you get a little extra time to let your body recover from that last pitch.

You get to, you know, if you want to do something in terms of alignment, you can make sure everything's in its right place. And there's no cost to doing that. And yeah, it only adds, you know, probably the tiniest bit of probability, but if it's free, you take it. And so, I mean, I wonder, and this gets back into the, you know, the traditionalist argument of, you know, really the only other, the really the only way that you're really going to cut down the pace of the game is actually just to install a stopwatch somewhere on something and to really start enforcing that. And when you think about football and basketball, in basketball, you know, you can dawdle, but

you have 24 seconds to take a shot, or else you have a very real consequence. You lose the ball. In baseball, the goal of the game is to accomplish these strategic things that you've got to do. You've got to make three outs in the inning, and as a batter you want to avoid making outs and push the runner across. But there's absolutely no penalty. And so, you know, that's realistically, I think some of these things that they talk

about, you know, kind of slipping in time limits and slipping in some of the, you know, you're not allowed to do this. I think that it would have to be on a much more global scale if we're really going to make a dent in this problem. I think you could fritter away 5-10 minutes off the pace of the game, but it seems that when people talk about it, they're like, no, no, we want to get it down

from what's a three-hour game to a two-hour game. You could cut out some of the commercials in between. Yeah, I don't know. Nobody's going to want that. Yeah, I don't know. Nobody's going to want that. Yeah, I don't think you do that without cutting out commercials. The other thing is a lot of these, like, eliminating mound visits or eliminating throws to – or reducing throws to first, they might have unintended consequences on game play. So I think the two – and if you cut down on throws first,

that might encourage base stealing, which is fine by me, because stolen base attempts are fun, and I'd rather take another couple minutes to have a game with more of them. But they've been working with, I think, a 20-second pitch clock in the SEC for years, and you'd never know it was there. But at the same time, Vanderbilt has, like, a team-wide policy of stepping out after every pitch and taking as long as possible to get back in.

So as a result, you know, they make the Red Sox look like the 1941 Cubs. They just play long, interminable games. So I think if you eliminate one stalling mechanism, another one will pop up. But the best way to do it, I think, would be a pitch clock and just instruct the umpires to move batters along, not allowing them to step out between pitches, things like that. But that might just be my own bias because I'm a Phillies fan, so I watch Jonathan Papelbon twice a week whenever the Phillies are winning,

and he takes forever in between pitches. Yeah. He's no Joe Peralta, but no one is. So how does that pitch clock work? Because I know Sam's position on the pitch clock is that he feels it would make him a nervous wreck, that if he were watching some sort of counter between every pitch, he would just be anxious and unhappy and distracted from the game

i've never seen it so if the bases are empty and you take 20 seconds between when you get the ball back and when you start your wind up it's counted as a ball to my knowledge there's no clock in the stadium this is just a directive that the umpires have been handed down, and I've never seen them have to call it. So it's just something that this is the rule, and nobody's pushing the boundaries trying to freeze the ball when the base is empty. They just know that there's a penalty for dawdling now,

so they don't dawdle. Yeah, okay. So there's that rule technically on the books in baseball, too. You know, when the bases are empty, there's the 12-second rule, which is rarely enforced. And it's hard to say how often it's violated. I tried to figure that out earlier this year, but it's the way that it's written, it's sort of hard to pin down exactly when that 12 seconds is supposed to start. It's like it starts when the batter is in the box and is ready to receive the pitch or, you know, some language to that effect. And so if the batter takes forever to get in the box, then it's taking a lot longer than 12 seconds. But it's not necessarily the pitcher's fault. And so plus it's hard for the pitcher's fault. And, and so, plus it's hard for umpires to call that. I, I spoke to one umpire who told me that if you do

call it just because it's called so rarely, if you, if you do call it, you're just leaving yourself open to a lot of criticism that, you know, the players are, are upset and the team is upset and, and they call you and they say, he didn't take 12 seconds. And or, you know, why didn't you call it on this other guy? And then it's just this whole can of worms. And that umpire felt that the league doesn't really back up the umpires strongly enough in that situation. And it's I mean, it's a collective bargaining issue. And that's, I guess, the problem here is that owners, you know, I don't think players are going to lead this charge, right? Because I don't think they mind.

I don't think they want to be rushed along. And that's what I was told. They might want to get out before the bars close. Possibly. Possibly, yeah. out before the bars closed possibly possibly yeah but yeah from what i was told it would not be the players pushing for this that they would have to be persuaded to agree to it and then i guess that's the problem is if you're the owners your your primary goal is always saving money and somehow somehow managing to gouge the players or restrict their earning potential in some way. And so it's hard to

maybe draw a straight line, at least in the short term, between speeding up games and owners making more money. You could say in the long term, it's good for baseball and it will help keep fans and attract fans if the game is speedier and everything. but people tend to think of their short-term interests. And if the game is 10 minutes faster next year, that doesn't necessarily mean that owners will be suddenly raking in much more money. So you'd have to try to talk the owners into using up some of their bargaining power and using up some of their leverage to get a concession from the players to speed up the pace of play,

which might mean that they could get that done, but they couldn't get something else done that would actually make them tangible money in the short term. So that might be hard. It might be the sort of thing where we all want it to happen, and a lot of people want it to happen, but not everyone's interests are aligned in such a way that it would have a champion. But I guess that's maybe the commissioner's role. Maybe that is something that he would have to spearhead, and maybe Rob Manfred or whoever it is will be the one to do that. I hope so.

I said I'll take care of it, Ben. Don't worry. All right. You got it. Yeah, let's make Russell the dictator of baseball, and we'll get this solved. Yeah, I think, I mean, the real issue is I think, I covered a doubleheader earlier this year between Indiana

and Ohio State that was relatively high scoring, and they got both games done within four hours. So I think that this might just be that major league hitters are – I don't know if you guys have seen anything on whether they're working deeper counts. That might have something to do with it, and there's nothing really you can do about that. But the commercial time, I think just televised games

take so much longer than non-televised games. So what good does it do to speed up the pace of play if you can't put the games on television anymore? Not that anybody's actually suggesting that. Except for the Dodgers and the Astros and all the teams that are not actually watchable by much of their local markets but do the Dodgers play shorter games

right because no one's watching yeah alright well thank you fellows for joining me and helping me get through this Sam Miller free day everyone should go read both of your

collected works Russell's of course at Baseball Prospectus and you can follow him on Twitter at Pizza Cutter 4 that's his name Pizza Cutter I was at

Sabre last week and somebody cited your work and in the bibliography entry, your name was listed as Pizza Cutter. I'm honored, I think. It's been years since you actually wrote under that name, but it seems to still be following you around. Yeah, it keeps popping up. That's, it was a little joke because I had to be anonymous when I wrote at the old place that I used to write at

and I was in grad school and I didn't want people to know who I really was. So that's the way it is. Yep, so you picked one of the less popular kitchen implements yeah okay and Michael of course you can read at Grantland and at

Crash Bernali and follow him on Twitter at MJ underscore Bauman and that concludes this fine show so we will be back on Monday I'll be back on Monday. I'll be back with Sam sounding like we normally do at the normal time.

And please support our sponsor, Baseball Reference. Go to baseballreference.com, subscribe to the Play Index using the coupon code BP to get the discounted price of $30 on a one-year subscription. Please start sending us some emails for next week at at podcastatbaseballprospectus.com, join the Facebook group at facebook.com slash groups slash effectivelywild. We're now up to 1,650 members. And please subscribe to the show on iTunes, rate and review the show on iTunes. It helps us attract new listeners, and it pumps up our egos.

Thank you, Russell and Michael. All right. Have a wonderful weekend, everyone. We will be back on Monday. Living in a memory My echo, my shadow, and me